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Those words linger in my mind as Sergei and I wrap up our time at the museum. I reach
into my pocket to give Tatiana a business card, and find something unexpected: my room
key from the Hotel Tranquility.
After saying good-bye to Tatiana, Sergei calls Nadezhda, who says she was hoping she
might see us one more time before we leave town.
“Oh, you'll be seeing us again,” Sergei says, smiling. “David still has the key to his
room.”
Nadezhda says she'll swing by the museum to pick up us in fifteen minutes. Standing
in the lobby, I ask Sergei a bit more about Nadezhda. Sergei is a fiercely loyal person. I
occasionally wonder if he has conversations in Russian with people we meet and doesn't
translate everything, knowing the person is saying something private, hoping it won't be
passed on to me.
I tread delicately.
Sergei tells me that Nadezhda and her ex-husband have remained friends—they just had
to be apart.
“I bet it had something to do with alcohol,” I say.
“I'd say yes. She just got tired of it. And she did what my mother could never do.”
He pauses. I remember how Sergei's mom stayed with his father through the alcoholism
and at least several beatings. Sergei is speaking quietly.
“You know, my sister and I are two years apart. If my mother had made the decision, I
wouldn't be here today.”
“You're two years younger than your sister.”
“Right, and that was the time she thought about leaving my father.”
“Before you were born.”
“And if she had done it at that point, I would not be in this world. Part of it was a woman,
with two kids, in the Soviet Union. If she left, where was she to go? Where would she
live?”
These are different times. And I take nothing away from Sergei's mom and the strength
she must have shown in a difficult marriage. Yet Nadezhda's decision to leave, to go off on
her own, to raise two daughters and run a hotel, impresses me.
We see Nadezhda pull up outside in her SUV.
“Nadezhda, sorry about the key,” I tell her. “But you know I just kept it to make sure we
would see you again.”
She smiles and drives us to a pub in town. As we get out of the car and walk toward
the entrance, I snap a photo of one of Ishim's main streets. It's this straight, snowy road,
getting smaller and smaller off toward the horizon, with a brilliant pink-and-orange glow
in the sky above as the sun sets.
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